SendMyCall School of Business Phone Etiquette is Now Back in Session

Class, welcome back to Send MyCall School of Business Phone Etiquette.

I hope you all had a pleasant winter holiday vacation in the Caribbean and that you are now properly tanned, rested, and ready to resume our business phone etiquette studies where we left off before the break.

To those of you teacher’s pets who’ve brought apples and left them on my desk, thank you. Although, to be honest, I would have preferred you brought me virtual toll-free numbers instead. But it’s the thought that counts.

OK, to quickly recap, we were talking last time about the vast amount of telecommunications power a business acquires when it buys one or more virtual toll-free phone numbers from SendMyCall.

And, as I demonstrated on the virtual imaginary blackboards inside each of your heads, the virtual toll-free numbers you buy from SendMyCall are just the starting point for gaining all that telecommunications power.

The rest of it comes from the virtual PBX business phone system SendMyCall gives you free of charge as a way to say thank-you for choosing SendMyCall as your virtual toll-free phone number provider.

The important thing to remember about this abundant power placed at your fingertips is that you must exercise wisdom in your use of it.

For example, let’s say you’re sitting on your living room couch, happily playing Candy Crush on your mobile device when you’re interrupted by an incoming call from an angry customer upset about the broken widget you sold him last week.

You’re annoyed by his call. Very annoyed. So you use your telecommunications power to forward his call to a number where you know there will be no one available to answer, resulting in the call being sent to voicemail, which in turn will result in creation of an email transcript of the message he leaves.

With a SendMyCall virtual PBX and virtual toll-free phone number package, you would be able to effortlessly accomplish all that. But it wouldn’t be polite.

That, of course, is the whole point of business phone etiquette – to treat your customers politely.

The reason to treat them politely is so that they will continue to be your customers and even refer their friends to you.

However, misuse of your telecommunications power can do the opposite and hurt your business.

You don’t want that, which is why you’re enrolled here at SendMyCall School of Business Phone Etiquette.

So, moving ahead with today’s lesson, here is what you should also know about business phone etiquette:

Sound as if you’re in a good mood when you say hello. You don’t have to be fake or syrupy. But if there’s a smile in your voice as you speak, the caller will feel comfortable and may reward you by saying “yes” to whatever you want him or her to do.

Don’t forget about a caller you’ve placed on hold. The longer you leave callers on hold, the less happy they’re going be by the time you return.

Minimize the risk of antagonizing the on-hold caller by coming back on the line once a minute to let the person know it’ll just be a bit longer. Ask the caller to please continue holding. Be apologetic when you ask and express appreciation when the caller agrees to keep waiting.

It will help matters if you utilize your SendMyCall virtual PBX business phone system’s on-hold music feature to allow the caller to listen to soothing tunes or informative recorded messages.

Make sure the colleague to whom you’re going to transfer a call is in fact available to receive it. Your SendMyCall virtual PBX business phone system allows you to transfer calls, which you’ll love being able to do when you know that someone else in the company is better qualified to work with the caller. But know that it’s bad form to transfer a caller to an extension when there’s no one there to pick up. See example above.